Personal Finance

I was a janitor for 7 years but lost my job in COVID and make almost $70k today after a career change.

Joel South

Published: February 16, 2025 11:23 am

Brevity, they say, is the soul of wit. So today, gaze in wonder upon this Reddit post which, in just 61 words, describes how one custodial worker managed to triple his salary in just 12 years.

Our hero today, let’s call him “Eugene,” says he took his first job as a janitor earning $18,200 a year in 2013. For seven years, he stayed in that position, growing his salary slowly but surely until, in 2020, Covid struck. That year, Eugene was let go, presumably deemed a “non-essential” worker. (Because really, why would you want to pay people to keep places clean and sanitary in the middle of a pandemic)?

Eugene’s journey

But do you know what? Eugene didn’t let that keep him down. He didn’t sit around cashing government checks, either. Instead, he went out and found a new job working in a warehouse. Eugene doesn’t say it specifically, but this was around the time Amazon.com‘s business really took off, delivering groceries and other items to folks quarantined and working-from-home. Whether or not he worked for Amazon specifically, Eugene surely was aware of surging demand for this type of work at the time, and he turned that demand into an opportunity.

The new job came with am immediate 20% bump in salary, from the $28,560 he earned in his last year on the janitorial staff, to $34,320 at the warehouse. Then Eugene won another raise in 2021, 15% this time.

In 2022, he switched career tracks again, but not entirely. Having acquired new knowledge and skills in the warehouse, Eugene saw an opportunity to move up the ladder into inventory control. And this move netted him his biggest salary increase, in percentage terms, to date: 25%.

Granted, as the labor market began to soften in 2023, pay hikes became harder to come by. Eugene’s wages barely budged that year. But no matter. Eugene had already learned the lesson that better opportunities are out there, if you’re willing to make a lateral move.

In 2024, Eugene took a position as a purchasing agent for a 30% raise. Eugene admits he may have had to fudge his resume a bit to get the purchasing agent job. As he explains it: “I had an idea what a purchasing agent does and faked to have those skills on my resume.” But it turns out he may have actually had those skills all along, whether he knew it at the time or not.

Because this year, 2025, he’s already received a 4% raise. Now he’s making $67,500 a year, 3.7 times his original salary.

What we can all learn from Eugene

What lessons can we learn from Eugene’s tale? I see at least three:

Lesson 1: Don’t view your job solely as a source of income. View it as a place to learn new skills, and acquire new knowledge. If Eugene hadn’t learned how operations work within a warehouse, would he have ever known there even was such a job as “inventory control?” I kind of doubt it. But he did take that warehouse job, and there he learned how warehouses work, and that they employ not just manual laborers, but office workers to keep track of what’s in the warehouse.

Once he knew that job existed, he could apply for that job, and the 25% pay bump that came with it.

Lesson 2: One way to improve your job title, and your income, is to seek promotions within the company you work for. But another way, and often a better way, is to make a lateral move to a new company and a new kind of job. Trade in the janitor’s mop for a warehouse forklift. Park the forklift and pick up an iPad and do some data entry. Put down the iPad, stop tracking the goods your company bought, and learn to negotiate the purchases yourself.

With each new job title, and each new company, comes the opportunity to grow your income significantly.

Lesson 3: The final lesson, though, is one I think even Eugene might not realize he taught us. His entire journey, after all, began with a job, janitor, that Eugene says he was “embarrassed” to do.

But a job, any job that someone will pay you to do, by definition involves work that needs doing. It has inherent worth, it teaches you skills, and yes, if it’s not the most glamorous job in the world, it also gives you motivation to find even better jobs going forward.

If you ask me, that’s nothing to be embarrassed about.